In January 2023, French troops departed Mali after nearly a decade of counterterrorism operations. They left behind a country governed by a military junta, a Russian Wagner Group presence, and a population that had, in significant numbers, taken to the streets waving Russian flags. For France, it was the visible collapse of a system that had quietly governed Francophone Africa for over sixty years – a system historians call Françafrique.

The term, coined by François-Xavier Verschave, describes the network of political, economic, and military relationships through which Paris maintained structural dominance over its former colonies long after formal decolonisation. The 1960s – Africa’s ‘Year of Independence’ – produced fourteen new Francophone states, but independence was in many respects procedural. France retained basing rights, currency control through the CFA franc (pegged to the French treasury), and a habit of intervening militarily to prop up friendly governments. Between 1960 and 2010, France conducted over fifty military interventions on the African continent. Françafrique was less a conspiracy than an institutional habit, embedded in the Élysée’s Africa policy and sustained by mutual elite interest on both sides.

What made the Sahel the graveyard of this system was the particular convergence of colonial legacies and modern state failure. The borders of Mali, Burkina Faso, and Niger were drawn at the 1884 Berlin Conference, slicing across Tuareg, Fulani, and Hausa communities with no regard for pre-existing political structures. The violence that France was asked to suppress after 2013 – jihadist insurgencies operating across the Liptako-Gourma triangle – was in no small part the product of borders that had never commanded legitimacy. France deployed Operation Serval in 2013 and its successor Barkhane in 2014 to manage it militarily, indefinitely. The strategic logic was colonial in structure even if not in name: external power stabilising a periphery whose dysfunction threatened the metropole’s interests.

For a decade it held, just about. Then three coups in three years – Mali in 2021, Burkina Faso in 2022, Niger in 2023 – dismantled it entirely. Each junta expelled French forces and ambassadors in language that was explicitly anti-colonial, framing the French military presence as occupation. In Niger, crowds gathered outside the French embassy chanting that France was the problem, not the solution. What was striking was not the coup plotters’ nationalist rhetoric – military governments reach for that register routinely – but that the rhetoric landed. Polling across the Sahel consistently showed that younger populations, with no living memory of independence, viewed France with suspicion bordering on hostility. The French presence had become the symbol of a failure it had failed to fix.

Paris was slow to read this. Emmanuel Macron’s 2017 Ouagadougou speech, in which he declared that France had ‘no role to play’ in Sahelian politics and promised a new relationship of equals, was received warmly at the time and contradicted almost immediately by French behaviour. Operation Barkhane continued. French special forces remained embedded with regional governments. The gap between the rhetoric of partnership and the reality of structural dominance was precisely what the juntas exploited. Wagner – renamed the Africa Corps after the Russian state formally absorbed it – filled the vacuum because it was legible: it came without lectures on governance, without conditionality, without the particular paternalism that Françafrique had worn as a second skin.

The historical lesson is uncomfortable for liberal internationalists. France’s failure in the Sahel was not, primarily, a failure of military strategy or counterterrorism doctrine, though both were flawed. It was a failure to reckon with the structural conditions that made insurgency endemic: artificial borders, extractive post-colonial economies, and the CFA franc arrangement that kept monetary sovereignty in Paris long after political sovereignty had nominally transferred to Bamako and Niamey. Operation Barkhane could kill militants. It could not address why, in regions of chronic state absence and economic marginalisation, militants kept appearing.

Britain’s own imperial retreat offers a partial analogy. East of Suez – the 1968 decision to withdraw British military forces from the Gulf and Asia – was similarly framed as a rational contraction of overextended commitments. In both cases, what looked like a managed withdrawal revealed, in retrospect, the gap between formal imperial power and the informal dependencies that outlasted it. The difference is that Britain's retreat occurred before the age of social media, before populations could film their own junta rallies and broadcast them to a global audience. France had to watch its unravelling in real time.

What remains is a question with no comfortable answer: whether any external power, however well-intentioned, can stabilise states whose instability is partly the inheritance of that power's own past. The Sahel did not become ungovernable by accident. It became ungovernable through a particular history – and France, for all its operational capacity, could not outrun it.